{"title":"The Useful Caribbean: Settlers' Botany and Plantation Cultures.","authors":"Hannah Anderson","doi":"10.1353/jhi.2026.a989310","DOIUrl":"10.1353/jhi.2026.a989310","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>guided by their sensory and embodied knowledge of plants' applications in daily life. This style of knowledge formation, which I call \"lived botany,\" was key to establishing colonies. Settlers' schemes of plant classification were influenced by the practices of enslaved Lokono and African people who demonstrated essential applications of tropical vegetation. Although settlers' lived botany was an important source of information for natural historians, colonists approached colonial ecologies differently. Lived botany reveals how multiple forms of botanical knowledge production fueled the growth of the early English empire.</p>","PeriodicalId":47274,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS","volume":"87 2","pages":"257-290"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147822269","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"In me you see the Almighty's wondrous Power\": Amelia Newsham, Race, and Black Women's Intellectual History in Georgian Britain.","authors":"Meleisa Ono-George","doi":"10.1353/jhi.2026.a989313","DOIUrl":"10.1353/jhi.2026.a989313","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Born enslaved in Jamaica, Amelia Newsham had albinism, a condition not fully understood in the eighteenth century that contributed to nascent understandings and debates regarding racial difference. Known as the \"white negro,\" Amelia was examined and exhibited across England by \"men of the Enlightenment\" who sought scientific explanations for her white skin. Their ideas were published or traceable in their correspondence. But what of Amelia? This paper places a brief archive from 1791 within the context of the ongoing \"race debates\" of the eighteenth century to consider how she understood her own difference and the question of human variety.</p>","PeriodicalId":47274,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS","volume":"87 2","pages":"351-367"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147822173","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Free Democracy\" and \"Restricted Democracy\" in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.","authors":"Markku Peltonen","doi":"10.1353/jhi.2026.a997080","DOIUrl":"10.1353/jhi.2026.a997080","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The Holy Roman Empire is not usually considered a place of democratic innovation, but this article demonstrates that numerous seventeenth-century academic authors in the Empire explored democracy within the newly established university discipline of political science. They published extensive textbooks and dissertations and examined democracy in unprecedented detail, arriving at a novel understanding of its character. They distinguished between two different kinds of democracy, often called \"free democracy\" and \"restricted democracy,\" and argued that the latter was a viable constitutional form, even the best form of the state.</p>","PeriodicalId":47274,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS","volume":"87 3","pages":"431-459"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148702365","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Contents of Volume 87.","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/jhi.2026.a1003017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2026.a1003017","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47274,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS","volume":"87 4","pages":"907-909"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149171129","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beyond the Revolutionary Motto? Three Polish Accounts of Fraternity in the Long Nineteenth Century.","authors":"Piotr Kuligowski, Bartłomiej Błesznowski","doi":"10.1353/jhi.2026.a997988","DOIUrl":"10.1353/jhi.2026.a997988","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article explores why, in references in Polish political discourse to the revolutionary triad \"liberty, equality, fraternity,\" the concept of fraternity was often supplanted by other categories. To address this question, the authors examine the shifting interpretations and reformulations of fraternity found within nineteenth-century Polish discourse, focusing specifically on three leftist frameworks that articulated communist, nationalist, and associationist variants of fraternity. Their analysis reveals that fraternity acquired a distinctive significance in the Polish context, evolving into a higher-order concept. Its meaning was shaped by the unique circumstances of a nation deprived of statehood.</p>","PeriodicalId":47274,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS","volume":"87 3","pages":"561-586"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148702337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Second Life of the Constitution of Medina: On the Possibility of a Liberal Islam in Turkey in the 1990s.","authors":"İlker Aytürk, Anıl Kahvecioğlu","doi":"10.1353/jhi.2026.a997085","DOIUrl":"10.1353/jhi.2026.a997085","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Ali Bulaç, prominent Turkish Islamist intellectual, proposed in the 1990s to revive the Constitution of Medina (622 CE) as a global social contract for post-modern, post-national societies. Focusing on this non-Western rejoinder to the Western conversation on multiculturalism, we analyze the possibility of a liberal interpretation of Islam. Can a faith-based document lend itself to liberal interpretations, leading to a Nozickean night-watchman state? How did this debate attract a broad array of liberals, New Leftists, and Islamists? We attempt to show how the CoM debate in Turkey provides us with a snapshot of pollination between Western and Islamic political thought.</p>","PeriodicalId":47274,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS","volume":"87 3","pages":"621-651"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148702401","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Race: Histories of an Idea.","authors":"Sarah C Dunstan, Ian Stewart","doi":"10.1353/jhi.2026.a989312","DOIUrl":"10.1353/jhi.2026.a989312","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Introduction to a cluster of articles: \"Race: Histories of an Idea.\"</p>","PeriodicalId":47274,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS","volume":"87 2","pages":"343-349"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147822295","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Democracy, Caesarism, and Kulturgeschichte: Georg Friedrich Kolb Contra Mommsen and Hellwald.","authors":"Iain McDaniel","doi":"10.1353/jhi.2026.a997083","DOIUrl":"10.1353/jhi.2026.a997083","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article analyzes the politics of nineteenth-century German cultural history, or what the historian and statistician Georg Friedrich Kolb called the \"cultural history of mankind.\" It shows that nineteenth-century cultural history became a key battleground in a wider dispute about democracy and Caesarism. It argues that questions about the proper scope and method of cultural history, which revolved around claims about human agency, progress and destiny, and the meaning of \"true culture,\" were deeply implicated in the political debate about the viability of modern democracy and its relationship to Caesarism.</p>","PeriodicalId":47274,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS","volume":"87 3","pages":"527-559"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148702342","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"As Metaphor or as Tool: The Computerization of the Brain Sciences and the Debate Between Cybernetics and Neurophysiology.","authors":"Danielle Carr","doi":"10.1353/jhi.2026.a1003012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2026.a1003012","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper challenges a dominant narrative of interdisciplinary fusion in the emergence of neuroscience through revisiting the mid-century encounter between cybernetics and neurophysiology. Focusing on the fraught collaboration between neurophysiologist Mary Brazier and cyberneticist Walter Rosenblith, it traces how the computer's dual status as metaphor and tool produced tension rather than synthesis. Drawing on archival correspondence and conference records, the paper argues that experimental neurophysiologists resisted cybernetics' metaphors, insisting instead on embodied practice. Ultimately, it shows that the informatization of the brain sciences was forged not through cybernetic unification, but through experimental alliances that formed around, rather than within, cybernetics.</p>","PeriodicalId":47274,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS","volume":"87 4","pages":"791-816"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149166664","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Engineering Sense\": Donald Hebb, Nathaniel Rochester, and the Origins of Deep Learning.","authors":"Yvan Prkachin","doi":"10.1353/jhi.2026.a1003011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2026.a1003011","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper examines the origins of the concept of \"deep learning,\" and traces it to its origins in the ideas of the psychologist Donald Olding Hebb. In the 1930s, Hebb formulated a theory of brain function that was meant to explain the surprising intelligence scores of brain surgery patients. This paper then traces how Hebb's cell assembly theory found its way into the earliest attempts by the IBM engineer Nathanial Rochester to engineer a learning computer in the 1950s. Finally, I examined the legacy of this encounter between neurophysiology and engineering for modern artificial intelligence and neural networking systems.</p>","PeriodicalId":47274,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS","volume":"87 4","pages":"769-790"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149166843","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}